The PC version of Sonic Mania has been delayed, Sega has announced. Console players will be able to snap up Sonic Mania from this Tuesday, August 15th, but the PC version has been shunted back a fortnight to August 29th. There must be some serious optimisation work going on to try and get it running at 60fps on a GeForce GTX 1080 Ti.

In all honesty, the reason given by Sega during a livestream was indeed that Sonic Mania has been delayed in order to spend some time on optimisation. Perhaps the vagaries of game development are beyond me, but it’s difficult to envision a scenario where a Sonic game based on the 2D Megadrive originals can’t run on an absolute potato of a PC.

Still, that’s what happening, and Sega is holding up an olive branch to PC players by offering up the original Sonic for free to all those who pre-order. That’s better than a kick in the teeth I guess.

We’re holding out hope Sega can pull a New Super Mario Bros with Sonic Mania and actually deliver a worthwhile sequel to the original trilogy. It’s safe to say the 3D offerings have been more miss than hit, and Sonic Mania goes back to the series’ 2D roots. It’s a nostalgia laden mix of original and remixed levels helmed by Christian Whitehead, a Sonic uber-fan who worked on custom games and ROM hacks previously, as well as enhanced mobile ports of the original games.

Precisely, it may a new game but the graphics are retro. There's no reason for any modern GPU to have a problem running a game like this. Even a GT 1030 would run a game like this at 4K with a butter smooth 60fps.